Ideas for Educators - Idea Blog

Highly Engaging Variation of 4 Corners for Review

6/2/2021

This year I was fortunate to watch a highly engaging review activity in a co-taught lesson on author's purpose. The partners did a virtual variation of a 4 corners routine.

Create slides with four quadrants.
Number the quadrants 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Place questions, problems or statements in three of the quadrants, leaving one blank on each slide.
Explain to students that they will be choosing a number before viewing the slide. If they choose the empty quadrant, they get a pass or point.
Direct students to chat in or voice their choice.
Reveal the slide and note which students get a pass or point.
Ask the other students to help work through the question, statement or problem of their chosen number.

The students were very engaged in this gamified review activity! I am so inspired by the creativity I see teachers using every day to help students stay engaged in the virtual environment. And the great news for me is that this activity can be used in brick and mortar settings, too!

A Twist on Word Banks to Boost Learning

5/14/2021

Round Lake School District co-teachers Kyle Monestero and Terry Beake decided to boost the math language component of note-taking. For this lesson on substitution, they asked their middle school students to add a box on the right side of their notes pages and label it "Word Bank." However, instead of giving students specific words, they encouraged students to create their own list of synonyms or related terms that help them to understand the concept. As they practice this over time, the teachers can encourage students to use this note-taking strategy in other classes.

This strategy has so many potential benefits. Research shows that exploring synonyms helps learners understand the key term in more depth. We also know from research that making connections between prior knowledge and new information strengthens memory. The personalization of the strategy will boost interest and commitment to it. And it is so generalizable!

Thanks Kyle and Terry for sharing this strategy with us!

Using JamBoard and Bull's Eyes to Teach Main Idea

5/3/2021

Helping students to determine the main idea of a story can be a challenge. I have tried several approaches over the years, including one of my most successful – the Bull’s Eye strategy. The general method is to discuss the value of the various circles of a Bull’s Eye. The smallest center is only large enough to capture one idea, while the outer rings can hold several less important ideas. In-person, I give students sticky notes to write sentences or phrases from the text and then discuss where to place them on a Bull’s Eye drawn on the whiteboard. More details can be found here.

Recently I had the opportunity to share this idea with Felicia Fischer, an outstanding special education teacher in Round Lake Area Schools. Felicia adapted the idea for her virtual instruction, using JamBoard and YouTube. She had students watch a short video on volcanos and then modeled how to move the ideas around on JamBoard, placing the main idea in the middle.

Next, students watched a Social Studies video and practiced on their own slide with three ideas that Felicia had created in advance for them.

After several practices in this manner, with lots of class discussion, Felicia began to teach students how to generalize this strategy to text, especially when they may not have access to sticky notes or a JamBoard. Generalization instruction is always a solid sign of specially designed instruction!

Thanks, Felicia, for creatively adapting to meet your students' needs in a virtual environment!

Spelling Practice with Letter GIFS

4/21/2021

Check out this fantastic example of engaging students through Total Physical Response! Michael Crisantos, a first-grade special education teacher in Round Lake Area School District, created an individual GIF of himself using a gesture for each letter of the alphabet, based on a phonics program they use. He then created slides, arranging the gifs to spell words in a short sentence. This example is just a still shot I captured – wish I had video to show you – but you can still get the idea. The sentence students had to write was I see Mom.

Thanks, Michael, for the creative energy you offer your students and co-teachers on a daily basis!

Voice Volume in a Co-Taught Hybrid Classroom

4/8/2021

With many co-teachers returning to hybrid classrooms, teacher voice volume can be a distraction for students. For example, If Teacher A is working with a small group of students through Zoom, while in the same space Teacher B is enthusiastically instructing in-person students, Teacher B's loud voice volume may carry over to students in Zoom. Because we want enthusiastic teachers AND environments in which students can easily attend, we need to get creative about this new challenge.

Round Lake Area Schools in Illinois gathered a group of individuals to brainstorm some easy solutions. We created a short list of the most practical ideas so that partners can choose what works best for their classes. Which one will you try?

Click here for the list and feel free to share!

Grab Student Attention With Their Own Faces

2/16/2021

Michael Crisantos, a first-year special education teacher in Round Lake School District, used this clever trick to grab his students' attention this week. During a review of counting by tens, he replaced some of the numbers with photos of his students. When he revealed the slide, the students had to be ready to fill in the number for their spot!

Not teaching counting? I can think of several other ways to use this:

Set up any questions or work in a 2x2, 3x3 or 4x4 grid and incorporate student images to indicate who will answer that question.
If reviewing geography, remove state or country names with student photos.
Reviewing steps in a process? Add student photos to some or all of the steps.
Replace some of the images on an alphabet chart - instead of an apple for A, a student face

Thanks, Michael, for sharing this idea and for all you do for your students!

Support for Reading Digital Texts

2/11/2021

Students everywhere are struggling with maintaining attention to digital texts. This can occur when a teacher or student is reading aloud while the others are meant to follow along, or when they are reading independently. Of course, if the teacher or student can use highlighting tools or arrows, that can be enormously helpful, but it is not always possible.

Lately, I have found it helpful to think about how I might have addressed this if I was with students in a school building, rather than a virtual setting. If so, I might have offered them a colored acetate strip to use in their paper book. Unfortunately, most students don't have access to this type of item at home, so I tried another idea last week.

Ask students to find a scrap of paper, and fold it to approximately 6 inches by 2 inches.
Direct students to use a bold marker to draw a line along one edge, and repeat with a different color along the other edge.
Explain that they can hold it up to the screen and use it to follow along while trying to read the digital text.
Suggest they try different colors to determine what works best for them.

The touch of tactile interaction is a novel change of pace from using digital tools and increases the number of neural pathways involved in the task of digital reading. Best of all, it is simple and free!

Improve Descriptive Writing with This Highly Engaging Strategy

11/17/2020

Recently, I used a strategy that I originally posted about in 2013. It was a success then and proved just as effective now!

The Slow-Motion Writing Strategy teaches students to expand their descriptive writing by imagining the events taking place in slow-motion.

Ask students to write down the sentence “They sneezed.”
Show this slow-motion video clip of several different people sneezing, while pointing out specific actions students can see happening.
Ask students to rewrite their sentences with more detail.
Continue the process with Slow Motion Flying Cats, Slow Motion Water Balloon, other slow-motion videos. There are dozens of them on YouTube.
If desired, have students videotape themselves doing various actions (throwing a ball back and forth, drinking water). Then replay in slo-mo, asking students to write detailed sentences about what they see.
Ask students to find a short sentence in their own writing that would benefit from more detail. Encourage them to close their eyes and picture the action in slow-motion, then write details into their sentence(s).

Students were highly engaged and remembered the strategy over the course of several weeks. The last assessment showed that student writing was much more descriptive!

DIY Document Camera Idea

9/23/2020

I saw this post last week and finally found time to try it --- and it works! So if you or your paraeducator don't have access to a document camera, or can't use your phone to project, then here is a simple DIY idea. You could also teach students how to do this so that they could show you any handwritten work.

The Secret Answer Strategy

9/21/2020

Increase curiosity and engagement with The Secret Answer Strategy. Announce near the beginning of class that you need a volunteer to “hold” onto the secret answer. If you are teaching in-person, place it into an envelope and seal it shut. If you are teaching remotely, create a Google slide, similar to what you see here, and share the link with a student.

At an appropriate place in the lesson, ask students an intriguing, close-ended question and have them share their thinking. After everyone has shared, direct the volunteer to open the envelope (manually or digitally) to reveal The Secret Answer. Adding this little bit of novelty can increase attention without distracting from your content or taking time from your pacing.